


habib albi

by toujours_nigel



Category: Padmaavat (2018)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Bisexual Male Character, Canon Compliant, Canon Queer Character, Canon Queer Relationship, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-04
Packaged: 2020-07-30 08:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20093938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: "Tell me about your wife," Mehrunissa instructs Rawal Ratan Singh.





	habib albi

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AllegoriesInMediaRes (AllegoriesInMediasRes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllegoriesInMediasRes/gifts).

> So I've gone the same route as the film and merged the historical Malika-i-Jahan (Jalaluddin's daughter and Alauddin's cousin/chief wife) with Mahru (Alp Khan's sister). Unlike the film, I've added in (some of) the siblings, children and spouses who should have been present, except of course the film's timeline is a big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff which capsizes two decades into about as many years, so honestly ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

“I want to see him,” she says into the night gathered in the curve of Alauddin’s shoulder, the curls of his hair freshly loosened from its braids. “Your prisoner.”

“Should I let you?” Alauddin jokes, bubbling over with triumph. “What if you fall in love with him? What would I do then?”

“What man could hope to hold my heart, after you?” She has the joy of feeling his body tense under her as the words find their way into him. He was always brilliant, Alauddin, even when he was just Ali Gurshasp, her wild cousin, and she too sheltered to see the poison in him. _After you have broken my spirit_, she means, and he hears it loud as if she’d clashed cymbals against his eardrum.

“You’ll take Malik Kafur with you,” he says in time, voice rumbling up through his chest.

She raises herself up on an elbow, her hand where the arrow had gone through his shoulder and pressing down hard. “Perhaps I oughtn’t go at all; I have my fill of danger with you, my lion.”

“I said nothing of danger,” Alauddin protests, turning his face to follow hers, glimpsing her smile and frowning. “I dislike being teased. Mehru, it hurts.”

“Who knows it better than I? I smile only because Allah has brought my husband home and victorious when he faced a foe so dangerous that I cannot go alone to visit him defeated and shackled in a prison cell with guards on every door.”

“It’s a matter of policy,” Alauddin says, but his voice is already fading, hesitant. He is great in war, her lion, and great in his lust for power and sex, but he has no notion of how to control whispers and manipulate opinions. Itaat was hardly well-loved, found no secret mourners after his death, even his wives have gone laughing to new husbands, and with all that how easily he found conspirators.

“Of course it is,” she soothes him, hands light on his hair and smile firmly in place. “There’s no shame in not winning every war you wage, in suing for peace when you have an advantage for the moment. You musn’t pay heed to what they say in court, they could hardly replicate your deeds, they would all fail like Itaat.”

“I’ve won this war,” Alauddin snarls, and she remembers when she used to be afraid of him, of the poison in his heart, of the power of his hands.

She arranges her face into a moue of contemplation. “Surely you are proposing to trade him for Padmavati? Besides, even if you kill him as he departs, they must have somewhere a son or cousin or nephew who can rule in his place.”

“Watch your mouth, Mehrunissa. I _am_ your husband.”

“And _I_ am the Mallika-i-Jahan, who is curious to see the prey her lion has dragged home from the desert, as he once brought me an ostrich when I only asked for a plume.”

“Malik will go with you,” he says. “That is my last word on the matter.”

“Oh very well,” she grins, and throws herself back on Alauddin’s chest, curling one hand over the cap of his shoulder. “I know you are only happy with him skulking in every shadow. I wonder that you don’t think we’ll fall in love with him, when you tease me about unwashed prisoners stealing my heart.”

She goes alone the first day, or almost: Malik Kafur waiting with the guards, ready to spring to her aid if she raises her voice in supplication. She walks slowly, careful to not stub her toe and cry out in pain, or she will never be rid of him: the dungeon is dim even at high noon with light filtering pallidly in through the small windows set high in the walls.

Rana Rawal Ratan Singh, on his knees in the grime, is smaller than her lion. Perhaps more handsome, though she has never been a great judge of male beauty. Certainly his eyes are kinder when they rest upon her in the unsteady light. Even her father’s had been. It is no great feat to be gentler than the ravager of the world.

“Tell me about your wife,” she says after a cowering guard has brought her what passes for the best seat in this pit: a frayed cushion on a steel drum, the stuffing peeking out through the tears.

The prisoner stares at her, no comprehension flickering in his eyes. This is going to be more difficult than she’d thought.

“I am Alauddin’s cousin and queen,” she tries again. “His harem is my concern, and your junior wife is soon to be part of it, if Chitor agrees to his demands. I would have you tell me about her.”

“Chitor will never bow to your monstrous husband,” Ratan Singh snarls, and tries to struggle upright in his chains, lunge for her.

He hangs helplessly a good yard from the barred door of his cells, but his efforts make enough of a racket that Malik Kafur calls out, “I refuse to be party to any suicide attempts, Malika-i-Jahan, our lord will flay me and leave me to the vultures.”

“I would _never_ implicate you in any of my deaths,” she calls back and turns to the prisoner still smiling faintly. “If Chitor would rather leave you here than send a childless queen to take your place, then who does it harm if I know a little about a woman who inspires such love in men so different as my lord and his prisoner?”

“Would you not care if she came into his household,” Ratan Singh asks, suddenly quiet as though his rage has been bled from him by her calmness.

“Alauddin loves all that is exquisite,” she replies. “He finds a place for everything from the priceless gem to the peerless hunter. Your priest spent months telling us how lovely your wife was, and Alauddin has been desirous since of adding her to his collection. So tell me, is she lovely enough to merit a place in my home?”

“She is more beautiful than my rough words can describe,” Padmavati’s husband tells her, and though the love in his eyes is intended for a woman walled away in far-off Chitor, it pierces Mehrunissa’s longing heart.

Out in the sun-drenched courtyard, she asks Malik Kafur, “Am I not the loveliest of my husband’s possessions?”

“Malika-i-Jahan is Malike-e-Husn,” Kafur says immediately, and pauses on his way up from a bow.

“I have no liking for your affectations of reluctance,” she reminds him, unreasoningly furious. “I am blood of Alauddin’s blood; I will have the truth from you.”

“Our lord rose once from Kamala’s bed with his back bloodied ribbons from her nails,” Kafur murmurs. “He stayed with Malika-i-Jahan until he healed, but sought out Kamala again the next day. His eye rests most approvingly on this servant of yours after some matter of violence well executed.”

“I was always a quiet girl,” Mehrunissa agrees, “even before he killed my father. You were with him that day, weren’t you?”

Kafur nods. “It was first my honour to serve him that night. Does Malika-i-Jahan desire to don ferocity?”

“Malika-i-Jahan desires to dine with Rani Kamala,” she says, and Kafur smiles, bows, smiles again.

It is common news in the palace that Kafur loves Kamala like a wolf the sister of his soul. Their hearts howl together as nobody’s sings with Mehrunissa’s. She was always a quiet girl, weaving dreams at her solitary loom, smiling at her own thoughts as Kamala smiles at Malik when they enter her home, Mehrunissa hanging back a little, waiting to be announced.

“You haven’t come to see me and you’ve been back for a week,” Kamala complains, moving to embrace Kafur, and then stops so quickly her ajrakh swings around her. “Sultana! I did not know you were doing me such great honour.”

“I did not know it myself,” Mehrunissa tells her, moving into Kamala’s receiving room while she rises from her curtsy and darts quick speaking glances at Kafur. She would not survive a month in Kamala’s domain, more window than wall, pavillion than palace, but it is lovely to sit on the plush cushions and drink sweet serbet: it washes the prison fumes from her throat.

“Malika-i-Jahan has decided to dine with you,” Kafur says, making no move to take a seat with Mehrunissa or Kamala. If she looks she’ll see his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, as though he might any moment need to pounce, and his hands are folded behind his back around the hilt of one of his many knives. How charming, that he is prepared to kill her for Kamala, when her sons will succeed Alauddin, while Kamala has given him no children at all.

“Alauddin will be looking for you,” she tells him before Kamala can make a show of her delight in offering hospitality. “We will do well enough without you interpreting.”

“Malika,” Kafur says, bowing, hesitating.

“Am I not the most serene of our lord’s belongings? Go.”

“There’s no harm in him,” Kamala says, after they have watched Malik Kafur retreat down the long garden path, never turning his back to them. Kamala’s maids bustle around, lowering blinds, bringing fans.

“There’s nothing but harm in him,” Mehrunissa corrects her, placid. “I would prefer Heaven’s breeze to those your servants can coax from feathered fans, and I would prefer an unreported conversation even more.”

The maids scatter, leaving almond paste and rosewater serbet in their wake. Kamala’s face, undisturbed by smiles, is long-eyed and strong-jawed: a beauty, but not in the first blush of youth, and too decided in its bones to have ever climbed to perfection. She has a daughter somewhere, a girl who must be ten or twelve now, had been a mother already when Alauddin had come upon her.

“Did you want to come away with our army? Did Alauddin have to force you, or did you choose to leave your husband?”

Kamala stares at her, forehead creasing into frowning lines that seem habitual. “Do you mistrust my loyalty to our husband?”

“No. I wanted to marry Alauddin, when we were children together and his father was our chief, and then when my father was and he was the fiercest of soldiers. Even now, when I shake before him I do not know whether it is from fear or desire.”

“Both, perhaps,” Kamala says. “It was both for me, when I came into his camp the first time. I thought my knees would fail to keep me upright, and I thought I would die if I feel anywhere but into his arms.”

“Perhaps it is like that for Padmavati, for all her husband thinks otherwise,” Mehrunissa tells her. “I went to see him today; I was curious.” She does not know, even having seen Rawal Ratan Singh, whether she was curious about him, about Padmavati, or simply about their marriage. Perhaps it is all the same thing.

“Perhaps,” Kamala agrees, calling up a smile that transforms her into an enchantress. “I would ask you not to judge any woman by what her husband thinks of her, Sultana. Think only how little mine ever knew me.”

They’re ready the next day. The warden brings out a proper seat for her, a pack of cards for Khizr, who is far more like her at a solemn fifteen than his raucous father. She would not have approved of her mother venturing into the dungeon any more than he does, but she would not have had the bravery to accompany her. Of course, Mehrunissa’s mother had never needed an escort into danger, had always been confused by her slow and steadfast sons, her sweet little daughter, had loved Alauddin and his brothers instead as proper Khiljis. Her mother was queen of the world when their world was shut in by the mountains of Afghanistan, before her father climbed to Sultan Balban’s throne over the protestations of all who thought them Afghan barbarians. Her mother never needed a strong-backed son to stiffen her spine, but the lioness bore a weak-willed cub and it is a comfort to Mehrunissa that Khizr sits guard over her private conversations.

“Tell me about your wife,” she instructs Ratan Singh. The wardens have doused him and the cell with buckets of water; she will have to order fresh straw brought in for his bedding. Guards like it when their prisoners beg for favours, and it is clear as an unclouded sky that this man would rather die of a wracking cold than unbend his spine.

“If I spoke of her for a hundred years you would still understand nothing,” he tells her. “You could never understand my Padmini, shackled in ignorance with your treacherous husband. You have no honour in you.”

“Certainly we might shackle her with my treacherous husband, if her fancy turns that way,” Mehrunissa says, and smiles when he gapes at her. “Alauddin would certainly like it very well.”

At least he doesn’t try lunging at her again, and she is indifferent to snarling men, after decades of her husband’s tempests. “You dare besmirch the honour of Rajput queens? You know nothing of it.”

“A Rajput queen has shared my husband’s bed for five years, if you call the Vaghela Rajput,” Mehrunissa says, still smiling. “I cannot tell you whether he woke from dreams of your wife to grasp Rani Kamala, or whether he simply adores the defeat of Rajput men and the submission of Rajput women, but I _have_ had a taste of Rajput honour and valour, little king.”

“Your husband drags women from their homes and you gloat about it?”

“My husband obtains his heart’s desire, at any cost. Now tell me about your wife. I know nothing but that men find her lovely, and that you brought her from Sarandib in lieu of pearls. That is all your priest knew, though he filled my husband’s ears with praises of her languishing eyes and polished brass skin.”

She had lain listening in the royal bed, under her father’s great crown, hoping, _praying_, that Alauddin’s interest would be caught and he would be content to set her aside and wander into the desert after this beautiful mirage: the perfect woman, lovelier for being unattainable. How naive she had been, even with Khizr running around with Itaat’s younger brothers and Shadi swelling in her stomach.

“She was a hunter when I met her,” Ratan Singh tells her, low and unwilling. “She thought I was an errant deer stirring the undergrowth and loosed an arrow that pinned my shoulder to a tree. She nearly killed me, the day we met.”

“Your life has always been forfeit to her,” Mehrunissa says in dreadful understanding, her path opening in front of her strung with obstacles.

Khizr jumps to his feet when he sees her, offers her his arm and leads her carefully up into sunshine momentarily blinding after the cool dimness of the dungeon. He’ll have Alauddin’s height some day, already a handspan taller than her, and growing into his over-large hands.

But his voice is still an adolescent crackle as he ducks his head and asks, “What did you make of him, ammi? Malik Kafur says he’s stupid and I daren’t ask abbu about him.”

“You needn’t pay such great heed to everything Malik Kafur says,” Mehrunissa snaps, and sighs and rubs Khizr’s arm where it wraps around hers. “He is a man of Majnu’s sort, and would go mad without his love.”

Khizr is quiet for a moment, absorbing this. Her studious son, sunk in stories; she will have to see whether they have Gajnavi’s poem, or only Amir Khusrow’s. Khizr would do well in any case to spend his days rather with Khusrow than following Malik Kafur, better yet to set up his own household somewhere far from Delhi’s poison. She is loathe to turn him loose, but he might be safer thus, coming to manhood away from the envious eyes that stalk his every step.

“Would abbu go mad without you?” Khizr essays, and then, reddenning, “or without Kamala or Mahika or Malik?”

“My love,” she says, amused, “what an insult to offer your father, to say he’s sane enough yet to go mad.”

There are still days when she wakes in Alauddin’s arms and loves him, oftener this month when he is wounded: a lion with a thorn in his paw, seeking help. He was like this when they were children together, piteous in injury, needing love more desperately than any ointment. This morning he is sweet-tempered, smiling at the women who wash his hair and allowing himself to be dressed in undyed cotton and helped to a chair.

“I’ll braid it myself,” Mehrunissa says, and dismisses her maids. Alauddin leans his head into her reaching hands, rumblingly happy. She learnt how to braid hair with his wild mane, when Arkali and Qadr complained that she dragged her comb too quickly and pulled their carefully-tended locks out at the roots. Her mother had objected that she was too close to Ali Gurshasp and her father had laughed, indulgent as always, amused at the sight of his wild nephew sitting quietly under his daughter’s deft hands. She could braid Alauddin’s hair with her eyes closed, in the dark, asleep.

She does, her hands unfaltering as her eyes flutter down and her mind seizes in terror. Alauddin doesn’t notice, leaning out of her grasp first in pain and then into Malik Kafur’s hands. Time to be brave, to die her mother’s daughter.

“No,” she says, “I’ll do it. I’ll welcome her in the Sultan’s absence, not you. At least, if that’s what my lion would prefer?”

She slants a smile at him, pliant as she had been when he first brought Kamala home, when his eyes and hands strayed towards Mahika. Alauddin likes to see her interests merge with his, to feel her loyal to his ridiculous demands, his first victim. Beyond her blood, beyond the sons she has birthed for him, it is this that has kept them chained together like that sad little ostrich Ali Gurshasp found for his laughing Mehru.

She keeps her eyes down still, compliant and complaisant, while he shakes his head at Kafur and declares he wants no other man around Padmavati. Kafur, Mehrunissa’s occasional guard and Kamala’s constant shadow, grins at his exclusion and drapes himself on Alauddin’s throne.

“Let me be the one,” Mehrunissa says while Alauddin is still doting on Kafur’s image of her welcoming Padmavati into their home, “to tell Ratan Singh that Chitor has submitted to Khilji might.”

“Yes,” Alauddin says, grinning wide and wicked at her, “you will be the harbinger of his final misfortune.”

“Malika-i-Jahan will carry word of the Sultan’s mercy,” Kafur corrects him, hand stealing down to tangle in Alauddin’s curls.

Mehrunissa smiles at them till her jaw aches, smiles to herself as she hurries along the corridors and courtyards followed only by a panting Hujuriya, smiles in the smoke-filled dimness of the torchlit dungeons as she approaches Ratan Singh’s cell. Tonight her father would be proud of her, her father with his lion’s strength and generous heart, her father who loved even the master who thought him barbarous, who took Balban’s throne from a boy who had seen three summers to keep it safe in cupped hands. Her father, who murdered that child and his father, to take the throne of a man who had thought him barbarous. Her father, who was killed in turn by the nephew whose greatest wish she is now betraying.

“Have you come to beg more news of my wife,” Ratan Singh asks her, painfully earnest. She has not visited him in a week, and he looks filthy, weak, piteous in his shackles.

“I have come to tell you that she will soon be my husband’s newest wife, and you will be set free to make your way to your desert fastness as best you can. Perhaps there will even be an escort to keep you safe, if she pleases my lion well enough.”

He snarls and lunges at her. Fool. She laughs, waving Hujuriya off, and approaches the bars of his cell, reaches a hand through and snaps her fingers to catch his attention. “You must put your pride away when I come to you tomorrow, little king, and accept the gift I bring. Do you understand me?”

He does not. Mehrunissa is still smiling as she departs the dungeon in the middle of his rant about ill-understood honour, as though it is so flimsy a thing as to need an unbending spine and unintelligent bravery. Honour lives in her bones, inhabits the air in her lungs, dances in the curls of her sons’ hair as they grow like young saplings planted in good soil, reaching ever upward to the throne their grandfather wrestled from his proud masters, their father from him.

But her blood is Khilji blood, red with greed. Padmavati steps out of her palanquin, and blood beats in Mehrunissa’s ears louder than Fajr’s azaan calling the palace to prayer. “You’re an ornament of the world,” she breathes. “Such beauty could draw angels from their honour, and the Sultan is a mere mortal.”

“And a criminal,” Padmavati answers, and her eyes are flint when Mehrunissa can bear to shift her gaze from the luscious mouth so sternly folded. “I will meet Rawalsa first, and these men will stay with me until he’s been released.”

They look sturdy enough to handle the guards who will be still in the dungeons, sacrificing their standing in the faith for their duty to Alauddin, as her maids are, as she is, as are the retinue Malik Kafur will have pressed into service to bring Alauddin the length of the palace and array him in due splendour. It will suffice. It must.

They enter the palace to the thunder of Padmavati’s companions stepping out of their palanquins. She will need to stop Alauddin from butchering them in the aftermath, if she is left in a state to influence him at all. If he is furious enough, hers will likely be the first head on the block, her eyes the first put out. May Allah give her the courage of her brothers, to laugh at her death as Qadr had, to try and protect the helpless in her last moments like Arkali.

Rawal Ratan Singh babbles about honour, shouting at the wife who has travelled a month to give herself to Delhi’s great devourer to rescue him. If Mehrunissa dies for this, who will ever tell Khizr that she was wrong about this man? He is not a man of Majnu’s sort, for what would Qays have cared for honour, with his beloved before him? And such a woman as Padmavati, for whose walnut-brown body in their bed, her deep almond eyes lit up with love, her rose-bud mouth softened into a kiss, she could watch Alauddin raze cities and burn kingdoms and laugh.

But these are dreams for death-quiet nights. Instead she dismisses Hujuriya and steps up to the cell, urgently whispering her plans, not to Ratan Singh who her mother would have had killed in sheer irritation, but to Padmavati who asks, “Why are you doing me this favour?”

“I’m doing myself the favour,” Mehrunissa replies, praying that Padmavati understands. “I’m saving my Sultan from this gravest of crimes.” It is true, or true enough. She could not bear for Alauddin to rape this woman who stares into her husband’s eyes as though his love is the oasis to which she has stumbled after a month in the desert. Even less could she bear for him to seduce her.

Padmavati’s guards turn Ratan Singh loose and it seems for a moment as though all will go according to plan, and she might pretend to have been overpowered by the men and escape the greatest part of Alauddin’s ire. But then Rajput honour intervenes and she is left trembling outside the doors while the fool challenges her lion, frozen between the hope that she will be widowed and that Padmavati will.

Alauddin shouts for Ulugh Khan as Ratan Singh reemerges, smugly satisfied under the grime of imprisonment, and Mehrunissa stumbles and breaks into a run. It was Almas who blinded and beheaded her brothers after promising them safe passage if they surrendered, Almas who executed her mother, Almas who has broken her sister as even Alauddin has failed to break her. If Almas finds her, he will take joy in the killing; she knows it as surely as she breathes still.

Ratan Singh matches her stride for stride, his smile startlingly white, his eyes shining. “You have a gazelle’s speed to match those doe eyes, Sultana,” he says, and she takes hold of the hand he extends to her, nearly laughing herself as terror bubbles over into exhilaration. They race through the palace, ducking into corridors emptied out for prayer, Mehrunissa grateful for the years of playing with her siblings and sons. She knows it better than Alauddin, perhaps, and certainly better than Almas: always his brother’s sullen enforcer, rarely unbending enough to play with his cousins and never with his children or nephews.

Alauddin isn’t like Almas, beyond the height they inherited from their mother, the stern curve of the jaw her brother had had. His eyes have their shape and colour from the grandmother he shares with Mehrunissa, and the depth of fury in them from his father who had nursed his little resentments like date palms that grow in the deep desert, precious and precarious. She remembers being cradled in his great gnarled hands as a toddler, and the uncut emeralds set in his rings and how they had caught at her hair.

She had been only three when he died, and only Mahmud’s hand on her shoulder had persuaded her to look upon his corpse. Alauddin--but he is always Ali in her memories of their childhood, their flowering youth; as late as Khizr’s birth she had still called him Ali and longed for the sharp curve of his smile--had been a disconsolate twelve, always furious, always on the verge of tears. He had been wary of Mahmud, but he and Almas and Qutlugh had been a knot of fists and bared teeth forever tangling with Arkali and Qadr; only Muhammad had clung close to his mother and aunt, helped them by caring for Mehrunissa and her infant sister.

She could go to him, if Alauddin exiles her; in time she might even beg her sister to visit. Almas won’t care; Almas loves war far more than he loves women, and thinks of Mehru’s lovely sister as a burden likely to break his spine if he hadn’t broken her spirit first.

Barred in her chambers at night while the palace arms itself, Mehrunissa spins out a life with her sister in Muhammad’s care. Oh, he’s loyal to his brother, or Alauddin wouldn’t suffer him alive, but he’s a man of few ambitions, quieter than his grasping siblings. He would neither deny her his home nor use her to further his aims, and his wife is generous, older than Muhammad and kinder still. They can stay in some walled garden in his palace, indifferent to the world, visited occasionally by their children: Khizr less than Shadi, not from lack of love but rather a need to exhibit an allegiance for his father. A few quiet years, and an unassuming death as its end. Perhaps Alauddin will shed a tear or two when he reads the missive announcing his Mehrunissa is no longer among the living: surely his anger will have abated by then.

She doesn’t care. Whether she lives a day or a decade more she will remember always Padmavati’s smile, her shining eyes, the grave grace in every long limb. She will, and Alauddin won’t. It is enough of a victory to rest upon, when she has spent seventeen years tied to the man who was once Ali Gurshasp who doted upon his little Mehrunissa as her brothers never did, who demanded love from her after killing her father, having her mother blinded and her brothers slaughtered. It will serve, that she has seen Padmavati and spoken to her and set her hands on her slender waist and supped on her tearful gratitude. It will do, it will do: she is a Khilji and has achieved her aims and kept her rival from his. What greater glory does she need?

But Ali is nothing like Almas, and the cruel shell of Alauddin--the second of the Khilji Sultans and the murderer of the first--still holds within it the grasping heart of Ali Gurshasp, who could never bear to be parted from those he loved, who never loved but without all limits. There are no quiet gardens in her future, no hope of watching her sister remember how to smile. She leaves her titles at her husband’s feet, her blessings for his future that wrap around his neck like cosseted vipers, her finery in its ivory boxes for Mahika to pick over. She retraces her steps from the great hall to the dungeon, slow where she had run, escorted where she had been the guide, through every public space where she had ducked into the palace’s secret paths. Sorrowful where her heart had sung for a single glimpse of Padmavati.

Malik Kafur follows her down, frowning as though he had not just called her a traitor. He leans between the bars after she has been pushed into a cell, and hisses, “I told you not to make me party to any suicide attempts.”

“Alauddin will hardly blame you for my death if he presses the knife into your hands himself,” she tells him, and turns her face to the wall. She is one of Majnu’s sort, if Rawal Ratan Singh is not, and can spend her days calling to mind Padmavati’s face in this dank cell that held her husband.

She stays in the cell three months and a week. Shadi turns thirteen and spends the day on the filthy floor in front of her cell, Khizr pacing the floor and glaring away any guard who dares venture an objection. With Alauddin and Almas gone, there are few in the palace who would deny or defy Khizr; who does not know the vagaries of war?

Shadi has grown riotous in her absence, complaining bitterly of Ali’s plan of sending him to Muhammed, seeing it as an exile from court and royal favour. Perhaps it is in truth, and certainly it is for Shadi, who is too much his father’s son in this: always fearing negligence. To be away from the poison of the court will only benefit him.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Khizr declares, dropping carelessly to his knees and wrapping an arm around Shadi’s shoulders. “When abbu comes back, I’ll ask him to let us go. You too, ammi.”

It is a good dream, and one she has not dared to hope for. They have not shackled her in this cell as they did Ratan Singh, but its walls have constrained her reach just the same: she has only dreamt of the sister she has loved her whole life, and of Padmavati who she will for the rest of it. Life in a walled garden with her sons, even for a month, is a dream sweeter for its possibilities, but…

“Not you,” she tells Khizr, and drags a smile onto her face as his eyes shutter. “This will be for just me and Shadi. Wouldn’t you like that, darling?”

“Can I go hunting,” Shadi asks, reluctant to be coaxed out of his sulk. “Malik Kafur said I was too young.”

“Muhammed has a son about your age,” Mehrunissa says. “I’m sure you can go hunting with him, and riding. Your uncle used to be a great archer when we were young, perhaps you can learn from him.”

He had been better than Ali because he was stiller, than Almas because he could fill his mind with every moment as it passed. It will be good training for Shadi, for all that she won’t be sitting under a tree applauding his budding skills. He is so young, still, so loving and sweet underneath all his wildness, so quick to disregard the bars that cage his mother because she dared disobey his father.

Not like Khizr, who is too old to ever forget that he’s sitting in the dim filth of the prison beneath his father’s palace, whose eyes flick to the walls of the cell, the tiny window. He waits while Shadi climbs the steps, and says, frowning, “If you want to make a run for it, I’ll make sure nobody follows.”

Her beautiful son, her jewel of jewels. Let his father live long and the weight of the crown come to him late.

“Where in the world would I want to run, when my sons are in Delhi,” she asks, and he offers up a watery smile and they both pretend his eyes aren’t shining with tears. He kisses her hand and lifts it to his brow before he follows his brother out.

Her brothers are dead, her mother, her father. Where could she run, when her sons stand to inherit her father’s empire? Her dreams are full of burning sand and desert fortresses, but she is not fool enough to chance it with Alauddin’s army between her and Padmavati.

Kamala comes to her as the sky is darkening, resonant with the last birdsong of the day. No guards accompany her, and her hand looks sturdy around the bunch of keys, her jaw clenched in the smoky light of the torches.

“I’m not running,” Mehrunissa says as Kamala creaks open the door to her cell. She cannot give in to her heart which bids her fly bird-quick and sing of love to the newest of her husband’s desired ones. She never has, even when Kamala’s long eyes, Mahika’s quick smiles, bespeak a question or an invitation.

“No,” Kamala agrees, and takes Mehrunissa by the wrist in a careful grip. “Walking will be far better for your dignity.”

“Dignity.” An odd word to use for an empress stripped of her titles and imprisoned in her own palace, but no odder than the smile dancing in Kamala’s eyes as they emerge from the dungeon into the starlit courtyard. The palace is lit up as though for Eid or a wedding or... “Alauddin is dead.”

“No,” Kamala exclaims, as though she can make the dead live again with her ferocious will. Ah, that Mehrunissa had had that conviction. “He is not dead, nor gravely injured. Ulugh Khan has taken a deep wound but even that is healed.”

A celebration, then, Delhi dressing for her conquering hero. Perhaps he’ll bring Padmavati with him, perhaps she won’t be furious with Mehrunissa.

She goes with Kamala quietly, the guards and servants they meet flattening themselves against the wall, nearly as though Mehrunissa is a ghost or a djinn and Kamala the sorceress who bid her come forth. She is, she is, they are. She feels as a revenant might with blood stealing through cold arteries, stripped and set into a copper tub brimming with water still steaming, aromatic oils pooling on its surface.

Kamala dismisses her maids and drops to her knees indifferent to her fineries, and the first stroke of the scrubbing brush on her back is painful ecstasy. Three months in the dim cold filth of the dungeon, waiting for news and comfort and light, counting time by the moon, and now this. She had forgotten warmth on her skin, the slippery softness of oil, the sweetness of fingers unwinding her braid and stroking her scalp.

“Are you making me lovely in hopes Alauddin will give over his rage and forgive us our transgressions? Doubtless he will be in good humours, having won Padmavati.” Kamala’s hands pause in her hair a long moment, pulling where they had been delicately teasing through her tangles. “I do not mean to tease,” Mehrunissa says, immediately conciliatory. “You are kinder to me than you need be.”

“He hasn’t won Padmavati,” Kamala says, and in the polished mirror her face is hidden behind Mehrunissa’s hair and in Mehrunissa’s ear her voice is low. “Nobody has. Padmavati is dead by her own hand, with every woman in Chitor and every girl besides.”

Not a corpse brought back to life after all, simply one being washed before the funeral. “Do you know how it happened?” Mehrunissa can barely lift Ali’s sword, never could lift her father’s, had welts on her hands the time she played with her mother’s daggers. But Padmavati had been an archer in Sarandib’s jungles. Rawal Ratan Singh had been pierced by her arrows before he was pierced by her eyes. If he had died there, Padmavati would still be living.

“By fire,” Kamala whispers. “A thousand pardons, Sultana. I can see this brings you greater grief than I thought likely.”

“By fire,” Mehrunissa echoes. “Is it a Rajput rite?”

“When a fortress feels that its men will be defeated and its women...”

“Raped,” she says. “Yes. It was not so with you.”

“No. I did not feel it incumbent upon me to prove my husband’s honour with my death while he yet lived. And even had he perished in the field of battle as Rawal Ratan Singh has, I have always chosen to live, Sultana.”

“You turn towards life as a plant towards the light,” Mehrunissa agrees. “You and our husband and his. I am not made of the same matter.”

Kamala turns her, hands ungentle on her shoulders and dragging till Mehrunissa is pressed awkwardly against the edge of the tub, a trapped arm shielding her breasts from the metal. “I did not bring you out of that cell, risking a trip there myself, so you could perish from sorrow.”

Sweet Kamala. “Life has brought me few joys to balance its great sorrows, and now at last I have looked into beauty’s face,” Mehrunissa murmurs.

“Beauty gazes every morning from your mirror,” Kamala snaps, and beneath her irritation Mehrunissa can spot the tangled threads of dread. “Out of yours and mine and Mahika’s, and even out of Malik’s when he glances into one besides his polished blade. Beauty won’t raise your sons to manhood, Sultana.”

Her sons. Khizr so gentle and Shadi so wild. Only a week ago they had shared a quiet dream of love with her, that her heart had not known to hope for. But her heart, her heart has turned to stone embedded with the topaz of Padmavati’s eyes, the carnelian of her smile. “You will be kind to my sons,” she tells Kamala, raising a hand to her face, thumbing a tear away from her cheek. “You will raise them to be warriors like their father and like you, to always choose to live. You can even teach them to weep as you do for their weak-hearted mother, who had not that in her that shines out in dark days.”

Kamala kisses the hollow of her palm, the back of her hand, leans in to press a kiss where her wet forehead meets her filthy hair. “You are Delhi’s hearth-fire, Malika-i-Hind, everything that is lovely in this city, everything that is sweet in it, takes its warmth from you. The city would plunge into darkness were you to die.”

She wants to laugh it off, make a joke that is not quite a joke about herself, about Alauddin, about the city. But Kamala fixes her with a steady and patient look and she finds that she cannot turn from it. Kamala is a woman of whom her mother would have been proud. “I will try,” Mehrunissa says after the length of ten breaths. “But it would ease my heart if you mothered my sons regardless.”

“Sultana,” Kamala says, and her hands are warm on Mehrunissa’s wrist and her cheek, “who do you think has been conspiring with me to win you freedom? Now come, the water is growing cold and your fingers are pruning.”

As Mehrunissa dresses she can feel Kamala’s eyes lingering on the fullness of her breasts, the curve of her buttocks, the slenderness of her arms, the slope of her throat. In another year she might have turned into Kamala’s arms for a kiss when she wraps her in the drying sheet. In another year she might yet. Kamala’s gaze is the promising warmth of a banked fire, and Mehrunissa has been too long scalded by Ali’s boiling desires. But in another year; when her heart might reveal itself to not be stone, but snow on the Himalayan peaks that melts in high summer. Perhaps then she can look at Kamala’s dark eyes and pink smile and not wish them pale brown and red.

Kamala feeds her from shared plates and puts her to bed still in her own pavillion, tucking a quilt around her against the night breeze. She is tender with it as though Mehrunissa is as dear to her as a daughter, sister, bride, when Mehrunissa has had comfort in none of these roles, not with her father and not with her brothers and not with her husband.

“Sleep well, Sultana,” Kamala tells her, solicitous, and this time it is Mehrunissa who grips her by the wrist and elbow and holds her still stooping over the bed.

“I am no longer your Sultana,” she says. “Alauddin took my titles from me.”

“Then you will be Mehru of the Khilji tribe, whose father was a chieftain and whose brothers great warriors, whom Alauddin married for love. And you will be asleep, Mehru, because I bid you and I am still a princess and was once a queen.”

“I am biddable,” Mehru says. “I would have obeyed you simply because you are Kamala.”

She does. For a week she wakes and eats and bathes and walks in the gardens with her sons as Kamala bids. All unwilling she can feel life seeping into her limbs as the rain into parched earth after a long summer. It is quieter than the lightning storm of her love for Padmavati, a soft shower coaxing shoots of grass from the ground, but Khizr smiles an unforced smile and Shadi climbs an inadvisably tall tree and Mehru finds herself turning again and again to Kamala for her approval.

The day her hands are steady enough again to work the loom, the Khilji army returns from Chitor. Mehru doesn’t go to court. She doesn’t even go to her own chambers, where the windows now stay forever open. Instead she sleeps the day away in Kamala’s bed and wakes to find Alauddin regarding her with his head tilted like a falcon’s.

“I thought I left orders,” he comments, turning as Kamala enters the room.

“I thought you had some semblance of sense,” Kamala retorts. “She would have died of fever and then your sons would have killed themselves or you from grief.”

“I have other sons,” Alauddin scoffs, but he sits beside Mehru and cups her chin in one hand, tilting her face towards the light.

“I would have killed Mahika and her son, if Mehrunissa died because of you,” Kamala says, calm as though defiance can truly be offered to Alauddin. Her hands are steady when she takes her accustomed seat on Mehru’s other side and her accustomed grip on Mehru’s left wrist.

“And what,” Alauddin asks, now busy peering at Mehru’s eyes, “if I took another wife or three, or forced sons out of you?”

Kamala laughs, a full-throated thing that has Alauddin looking up at her, frowning. “My husband,” she says, “you forget that I was born a Rajput woman and well know how to die like one.”

“Promise me you won’t,” Alauddin says immediately, and it is his hand on Mehru’s face that shakes.

“Surely you haven’t lost your taste for death,” Kamala teases, and, oh Mehru knew how well they fit together, Kamala and Ali and Kafur, these snarling beasts to whom she is bound.

But it is strange to see Ali sigh and signal defeat. The lines are graven into his face in the afternoon light that streams in as Kamala opens the windows. He looks weary, chipped away by war and passion and his own arrogance. He looks like Ali Gurshasp, who set his heart always on winning. She had loved Ali with every beat of her naive girl’s heart.

She stays in Kamala’s bed as he leaves, she doesn’t talk to him even though he looks oftener at her than at Kamala with whom he speaks. At night Mehru sleeps curled around Kamala, wakes to soft and fervent kisses pressed to her palms, her cheeks, the curls escaping from her braids.

The next morning Khizr and Shadi come smiling to her with the news that they are all three allowed to visit Muhammed once winter wanes into spring.

That night she leaves Kamala’s bed for her own; the next week she allows Ali to join her in it. They sleep curled close like children frightened by the enormity of love, the impossibility of valour. There is no comforting Ali, but nor is she inclined to make the attempt. She does not know what prompted Ali’s forgiveness, but no answering impulse has taken root in her heart. He killed her father, he killed her mother, he killed her brothers, he killed the woman they both loved. Allah in his mercy may well forgive Ali; Mehru is but a fallible mortal.

“You’ve seen her,” Ali says one morning, drawing his fingers through hers, his thunder-voice a low rumble under her ear, his heart a steady thump.

“I have.”

“Tell me how she looked.”

“The priest was correct,” Mehru begins. “She was older than he’d known her, but still tall, still slender. Her eyes were…”

“No,” Ali says, and flattens his hand over her heart, his palm tender against the swell of her breast. “Tell me how she looked in here. Tell me how she looked to you.”

“Like a star fallen to earth,” she says. “Like an oasis in trackless desert.”

“Like a fire roaring up to the sky,” Ali says. “Yes. That’s how she was. How could I not burn cities for her? How could you not risk your life?”

Her laughter sounds rusty with disuse even to her own ear. Ali pulls away till he can look at her pitiless eyes, her mirthless smile. “I did not defy you and Almas and the swords of this city to set Padmavati free because I loved her. Ali, you fool, you beast, I set her free despite that love, because there is something in the world beyond desire.”

“Not for us,” he insists, gripping her hard about the waist. “We are made to run wild in passion’s pursuits, for wealth and power and love. You saw her, you spoke to her, you know how she pierces the heart.”

“I saw her,” Mehru agrees. “I spoke to her. I could have gone with her. I should have gone with her, made an excuse of her needing a guide. I could have left this palace, this city, this marriage with you. I could have gone with her, I could have lived in her home, I could have merged her shadow with mine. I should have followed her barefoot through the desert. I should have died with her, I should have died before I let you into my bed again, I should have died with her smile fresh in my memory. I should have gone with her.”

He holds her while she weeps against his chest, his hands gentle in her hair, his voice a soothing rumble muttering nonsense. Ali Gurshasp, Alauddin Khilji, the iron shackle with her name carved into it.


End file.
